Owlet Nightshift Integrates Cellular Connectivity with Digi XBee

Digi XBee® gave Owlet Nightshift the processing horsepower they needed for a Zigbee Mesh solution. Watch this video to see how the open protocol and embedded modem, was a simple solution to integrate cellular connectivity into their outdoor lighting technologies.

Owlet Nightshift, developed by Schréder and headquartered in Mainz, Germany, supplies intelligent tele-management systems for monitoring and controlling outdoor and roadside lighting. Owlet partnered with Digi XBee to integrate cellular connectivity into their lighting devices to help reduce energy usage, maintenance, and operating cost while improving safety.

I'm Daniel Brand. I'm the Head of R&D in a company named Owlet. Owlet itself is a subsidiary of Schreder. Schreder is a Belgian Brussels space, luminaire manufacturer, and Owlet is the development R&D center for controlled solution in outer lighting. The solution we developed over the last 10 years actually is outer lighting controls so we can communicate with each street light luminaire, bring that to the internet. And we are able to send dimming commands, getting failure messages out of these street luminaires and can display that on a user interface.

For example, our latest generation has two pathways for communication, we have cellular and mesh communication in the field. So when you install a controller on a street light luminaire, it's measuring actually the position through GPS. It's announcing itself to our cloud solution. We have installed sensors, passive infrared sensors, for example, to detect if people are approaching by bicycle, pedestrians, and so on. If those are detected, we bring up the light to the right light level, maybe 80%, maybe 100%, whatever you configure. And keep the light as long as somebody is there. And when the people are disappearing, we ramp down then the light to a very low level again.

Definitely the motivation is cost reduction through energy savings, for sure, as well maintenance. So maintenance chores can be reduced because the system can announce where luminaires are not working, failure messages. And also, there's more and more demand to be ready for the smart city approach. Smart city approach means combined different applications in cities, parking, outer lighting, and other applications to push data to the cloud.

How Digi is helping us to provide unique solutions, for example, is the implementation of Thread Protocol into the XBee module, which we can easily implement, we have it there. It's the same footprint, it's easy to implement. And with the Thread Protocol in the mesh network, for example, we can provide full IPv6 network to cities, which makes it easy to be future-proof for other smart city applications.

We tried a lot of these technologies, and we thought that mesh technology would be the best one, and we wanted to build our solution on open protocol. So we were looking for, at the end a ZigBee solution, ZigBee mesh solution, and Digi was a provider of such a module. And as well the module approach, and also that Digit was providing the gateway, the ConnectPort on the other side that was a big advantage. And also during our different generations of our product portfolio, we continued working with Digi because there's a good support and still using the module approach helps us to reduce development times a lot.